/vr/ - Retro Games

>What went wrong?
It was doomed from the start. Outside of Sony not entering the video game market, there was no way for Sega to finish the generation unscathed. The most glaring reason being the poor hardware design which required more chips over more buses at a greater expense to accomplish what the competition did with less. So Sega was in that awkward position where it had to charge its customers more to break even, or to sell at parity with the competition and incur a large deficit. Sega chose the latter in hopes of capturing a larger market share with games sales making up for the hardware losses or possibly holding out hope for unexpectedly large component cost drops in the future to mitigate manufacturing expenditure. Their gamble didn't pay off after wasting what was probably many hundreds of millions of dollars and they were faced with that awkward realization that they retained greater profit by not producing consoles rather than trying to remain in the fight.

Though it's not like Sega would have been a huge success that generation even with a lower-cost, more integrated hardware design. Their was so much rot within the company that had been forming for years which ensured that. It would have been less damaging in that scenario, however.

>>7101979
>The refused the SGI and Sony collaboration
And supposedly the 3DO hardware designers came to Sega around '90/'91 and presented their ideas and asked for funding and were turned down as well. Not that that would have been the right console for Sega, but it does show that they were presented with numerous options and still decided to go with their own in-house design. A design which had 6 major buses versus 3 for the Playstation, 2 for the 3DO, and 1 for the N64. A design that was not only slower and more expensive, but still had major flaws such as with transparency and alpha blending.

If all you care about is a prosperous Sega, than going all in with Sony would have been the smartest move. If you care more about a successful hardware producer, than Sega should have teamed up with SGI or the designers of what would become the 3DO.